Salvador Luria's unfinished experiment: The public life of a biologist in a Cold War democracy

This dissertation is a biography of Salvador Edward Luria (1912--1991), a key figure in the American biology community in the second half of the twentieth century. Integrating the history of science and American history into a single narrative, it focuses on the mutual shaping of scientific and democratic institutions during the Cold War. Drawing upon his published scientific papers, as well as his correspondence and declassified government files, the study uses Luria's work as a biologist and his efforts as a concerned American citizen as the basis for a discussion of how science and participatory democracy were practiced and experienced in twentieth-century America.; Luria's commitments to the rationality of science and the ideals of democracy can be traced to his mentors and friends in Italy during the early Fascist period. His research on bacteriophage in the United States in the 1940s formed a crucial basis for many of the important biological disciplines of the post-war era, including bacterial genetics, virology and molecular biology. Luria's final professional position was as the director of the Center for Cancer Research at MIT. The trajectory of his career from basic research to biomedical applications parallels the political, financial and technological history of the life sciences in the United States.; Luria was as committed to his responsibilities as an American citizen as he was to his position as a scientist. His political activities in the United States ranged from campaigning for Henry Wallace in 1948 to protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. His life provides an example of how Cold War democracy affected the lives of citizens in the United States, especially during the McCarthy era, when he was investigated by the FBI and denied a passport for political reasons. Thus his experiences provide the basis for a discussion of shifting concepts of authority in American democracy in the last half of the twentieth century, and the ways in which the biomedical sciences were also shaped by the Cold War. Luria's life raises important questions about authority and scientific expertise within American democracy, and offers a new perspective on the political and social roles of scientists in American culture.